for people who care about the West

Reinstating the heir to the Truckee River

A mammoth trout, thought to be
extinct, could live again in a Nevada river

Reno, Nevada
— Professor Mary Peacock is a geneticist, first and foremost.
But she’s also a detective, and she’s working on a
tough case. It’s difficult, because the victim is thought to
have died about 60 years ago. And the case has a peculiar twist:
The question is not who the murderer was — that’s been
well-known for years — but whether the victim is really
dead.

Professor Peacock’s case revolves around a
legendary fish — the mammoth Lahontan cutthroat trout that
once lived in the Truckee River, which flows from Lake Tahoe and
feeds Pyramid Lake, 35 miles north of Reno. The fish is thought to
have died out in the 1940s, but Peacock believes otherwise, and in
her lab at the University of Nevada, she has set out to prove
it.

From the formaldehyde- and methanol-filled jars that
line the shelves of her lab, she takes out 80- to 100-year-old
Lahontan cutthroat specimens. She then grinds fin and muscle
tissue, from which she extracts genetic information that can be
compared to that of living fish found nearly 300 miles from the
Truckee River Lahontan cutthroat’s original home.

If
Peacock does find a living fish with direct bloodlines to the
vanished Truckee River Lahontan cutthroat, it will have huge
implications for the lake and the Truckee River. Not only could
anglers once again haul 40-pound-plus fish from the river basin,
but the trout could serve as the cornerstone of a recovery effort
for the river.

But as Peacock works to identify the
rightful heir to the Truckee, it’s becoming clear that
restoration won’t be easy, thanks to a tangle of federal,
state and tribal politics. The recovery effort also raises deeper
questions about ecological restoration, and just how far
we’re willing to go to bring back the West’s endangered
species.

Who killed the Lahontan
cutthroat?

Pyramid Lake — named for the chiseled,
shark’s-tooth island that rises from the water — looks
like a wide and majestic mirage, landlocked in its desert valley.
Pyramid is a remnant of glacial Lake Lahontan, which once spread
across 5.5 million acres of the Great Basin in northwestern Nevada,
northeastern California and a small piece of Oregon. The Lahontan
cutthroat, which likely descended from coastal cutthroat trout,
evolved in Lake Lahontan 600,000 years ago, developing a tolerance
to the warm, salty waters of the lake, which had no outlet to the
sea.

Then, about 8,000 years ago, the glacial lake
receded, leaving behind smaller, isolated lakes. Within these lakes
and their feeder streams, individual populations of Lahontan
cutthroat developed minute genetic adaptations to their new
habitat. In Pyramid Lake, the Lahontan cutthroat evolved into a
piscivorous species — that is, it began to feed on other
fish, and so moved up the food chain.

For millennia, bands
of Paiute Indians sustained themselves on the lake’s
bountiful cutthroat and the cui-ui sucker. But in 1874, President
Grant placed the Pyramid Lake Paiute on a reservation surrounding
the lake and lower Truckee River, and set the stage for massive
change. The tribe soon built a cannery that exported up to 50 tons
of Lahontan cutthroat trout per year to groceries and restaurants
across the country.

Then, in 1905, Congress ordered the
newly formed U.S. Bureau of Reclamation to build Derby Dam, 30
miles upstream of Pyramid Lake. The dam diverted half the
Truckee’s flow into the neighboring Carson River for
irrigation, lowering levels in Pyramid Lake, de-watering the mouth
of the river and destroying spawning habitat for both trout and
cui-ui.

Politicians and celebrities such as Clark Gable
still came to fish for the remaining 20-pound trout. But the loss
of spawning grounds and the continued angling pressures overwhelmed
the species. While other strains of Lahontan cutthroat survive
elsewhere in the Great Basin, by 1944, the Lahontan cutthroat had
disappeared from the Truckee River watershed.

The strain game

Three decades later, with the
passage of the Endangered Species Act, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife
Service designated the Lahontan cutthroat trout as endangered, and
committed to recover the fish throughout all the Great Basin
watersheds where the fish once existed.

The Truckee
Lahontan cutthroat had been given up for dead. But in 1977, a
graduate student discovered Lahontans on the other side of the
state in the Pilot Peak drainage, along the Nevada-Utah border.
Researchers believe the trout were stocked from Pyramid Lake,
possibly around the turn of the 20th century, by state fishery
managers.

A 2002 study by Jennifer Nielsen of the U.S.
Geological Survey found promising evidence that cutthroats from
Pilot Peak are, indeed, related to the former Truckee River
population; Mary Peacock’s work — which she hopes to
finish this summer — could clinch the association.

If the Pilot Peak fish are Truckee River Lahontans, says Fish and
Wildlife fisheries manager Lisa Heki, they are likely “most
able to adapt and persist in the (Truckee River) basin.”

But even if Peacock can prove that the
Truckee River Lahontan lives, a series of obstacles lies ahead.
Cutthroat recovery won’t be successful without the
cooperation of other fish and wildlife management agencies, which
have their own agendas.

During the 1970s, the Pyramid Lake
Paiute Tribe developed a Lahontan cutthroat fishery in Pyramid
Lake, using several stocks from outside the Truckee Basin. Those
fish interbred to create a genetically mixed stock now known as the
Pyramid Lake strain, which the tribe raises in its hatchery.
Although the fish don’t rival the leviathan trout of old,
they’ve helped the tribe develop a recreational fishery in
the lake that brings in half a million dollars a year in permits
alone. The tribe will obviously be reluctant to sacrifice that
fishery for the sake of recovering “genetically
correct” Lahontan.

Getting the states of Nevada and
California to sign on to the plan is another hurdle. Both states
have stocked non-native fish, such as rainbow and brown trout, in
the Truckee River, which is the most heavily fished river in
Nevada. But the rainbow trout’s success could thwart efforts
to re-establish Lahontan cutthroat, because the non-native fish can
interbreed with cutthroats and muddy their bloodline.

Fishery managers would have to cease stocking — or perhaps
even remove — non-native fish to ensure recovery of the Pilot
Peak strain in the Truckee. This could signal the end of the
non-native fisheries and bring a loss of revenue for the state.
Fearing any decrees from the federal government that would abruptly
end non-native stocking, Nevada walked away from the formal
recovery process in 2001.

“We thought we were
losing control on the river, and that’s why we left the
meetings,” says Mark Warren of the Nevada Department of
Wildlife. “It sounds like nitpicking, but the ESA brings some
real strong rules and regulations. We want to gradually restore the
run and maintain an active fishery.”

The effort to
re-establish the “genetically correct” fish in the
Truckee River Basin is an exercise in futility, says Warren.
“That (original) strain is extinct,” he says.
“You can get a lot of the characteristics (in the Pilot Peak
strain), but (the original population) is extinct, and Pyramid Lake
is different now anyway.”

Recreation and
re-creation

There is hope yet for the Truckee River
Lahontan cutthroat — if two questions can be answered
affirmatively: Does the Pilot Peak stock retain the adaptive traits
of the old Truckee fish — the one that grew to 40-pound
monsters? And can the Pilot Peak strain survive in the dramatically
altered Truckee River Basin?

Mary Peacock says the answer
to the first question is clear. The Pilot Peak Lahontan cutthroat
population is approximately 80 years old, what she calls an
evolutionary blink of an eye: “The chance they’ve lost
the evolutionary traits to live in the lake is pretty
small.”

Answers to the second question should come
with a series of ongoing tests to see how the Pilot Peak fish stack
up against the other strains. If, in fact, the Pilot Peak fish can
thrive in the Truckee, both the states and the tribe seem willing
to listen.

“If (Fish and Wildlife) gets a fish that
works well,” says Warren of Nevada Wildlife,
“we’re willing to look at it.”

That
sentiment is echoed by the Pyramid Lake tribe’s Albert John:
“If we can get a bigger fish, then that’s what
we’re after.”

That could finally fuse the
states’ and tribe’s recreational interests with the
federal recovery goals.

The Fish and Wildlife Service is
trying to build gradual support for the federal recovery plan,
instead of invoking the Endangered Species Act to bring about
immediate change. “We could (start stocking the Pilot Peak
strain) now,” says Fish and Wildlife’s Heki, “but
we don’t want to act unilaterally.” Flexibility and
cooperation from Fish and Wildlife now could bring a greater
commitment from the states and tribe toward recovery
later.

The effort will also get a big boost from a host of
river-restoration measures already being put into place (see story
below). Taken together, those measures could transform the Truckee
River from a fragmented, hatchery-reliant non-native fishery to one
with self-sustaining populations of native Lahontan cutthroat
trout.

“What the recovery process is trying to do
is re-create the natural systems,” says Professor Peacock,
“so humans don’t have to keep moving fish around for
the next century.”